“Good design is good business,” IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Jr. famously said. And for today’s organizations, that business-friendly design includes good information architecture. While cloud computing is changing the IT landscape, designing this architecture has only become more important in cloud-based business information management.
Information architecture is the single most powerful tool in configuring your cloud-computing environment to work for your business.
With SharePoint 2013, for example, information architecture is critical when using the on-premises solution or SharePoint Online. Getting the most from these tools still requires organizations to design a logical and intuitive site structure and create global metadata fields that enhance your content’s sortability, findability and searchability within document libraries.
Here are five reasons that good information architecture matters in cloud applications and makes a difference in your organization.
- Making cloud applications work for your business: When tailoring technology to your business needs, the options might include developing an application or workflow process that’s specific to your business. These one-of-a-kind solutions aren’t necessarily supported by cloud technology, but many cloud applications, such as SharePoint Online, do support information architecture configuration. If you use SharePoint Online, invest the time and resources up front to configure site structure, metadata and content types that support your company.
- Developing efficient, intuitive navigation: Information architecture is the key to organizing a user-friendly navigational experience, and has a significant impact on efficiency and usability. With SharePoint, for example, your information design process needs to account for enhancements and limitations of SharePoint and use this information in developing your site structure.
- Leveraging technology with content types: Developing custom content types may help facilitate advanced functions and improved performance. From a SharePoint perspective, developing your content types with sound information architecture allows you to enhance and leverage the really sophisticated technology that exists within SharePoint 2013 for information management, making it easy to identify content and apply record keeping and deletion policies across the organization.
- Enhancing records management and compliance: With cloud storage so prolific and so inexpensive, many companies start saving everything — sometimes to their detriment. With so much space and memory in the cloud, it’s important to develop and maintain strict information management policies to ensure that any content is kept for as long as necessary from a regulatory perspective, and then deleted when it is no longer useful or could become a liability to the organization.
- Improving enterprise search and discovery: In law and other industries, enterprise search must be very robust and complex to facilitate document discovery across email, online document management, instant messaging and other conversations. The cloud-based Office 365 service, for example, facilitates e-discovery by indexing email, SharePoint, document management and Lync conversations. But if you want optimal performance and efficiency from these tools, they must have good information architecture as a foundation.
For most business users, information architecture doesn’t change much between on-premises and cloud-based solutions. The question is how much your information management processes ask of users. If you’re asking them to apply three to five metadata fields, that’s one thing; if you’re asking them to apply 10 metadata fields, you may need to bring someone on to maintain taxonomies and values and create new content types to support new business functions. The key is to recognize that your information architecture should continually evolve to reflect the changing needs of your business.
Learn more about leveraging today’s business information management technologies by contacting Portal Solutions.
